What is a Scale Up Server?

Scale up server definition

There are two fundamental approaches to addressing increasing workloads: "Scale Up" meets the challenge through a bigger, more powerful server with added memory and compute capacity. This vertical building "up" of the server contrasts with the “scale out” approach, which adds server units to the workload horizontally. A scale up server is one that is designed to enable the simple and cost-effective addition of system resources to itself, enabling the "scale up" approach to work.

Why scale up servers?

Scale up servers are valuable in a number of scenarios, including:

When the workload itself is best performed on fewer machines, each with a high level of compute power

When physical space and/or electrical power is limited and a small number of high-powered servers are more suitable than a large number of low-power ones

When software licensing factors favour the use of fewer servers

When the complexity of setting up a “scale out” collection of servers is not justified by the workload

HPE scale up server

The HPE ProLiant family of servers offers some of the industry’s best scale up features. These include the HPE ProLiant DL560 and BL660c Gen9 Servers, which provide dense compute, right-sized storage and a large memory footprint. These two servers took the #1 4P world records for both max-jOPS and critical-jOPS in the MultiJVM category on the SPECjbb20152 benchmark. The DL560 Gen9 is the world’s most energy-efficient 4P server, winning three world records on the SPECpower_ssj20082 benchmark.

With the qualification of the new Intel® Xeon®1 E5-4600 v4 family of processors on the HPE ProLiant DL560 and BL660c Gen9 Servers, HPE offers feature-rich, dense compute with right-sized storage and larger memory footprint.